Elise Bunkers

Fake Trivia: America

OCTOBER 8 1500, AMERICA: Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian merchant, travels for his second time to the West Indies only to realize that this continent was entirely too big to be the West Indies and that it is in fact a new world. He quickly lays claims to the land and speaks to every native he can find to inform them that the correct way to pronounce the land’s name is “uh-MER-I-Kuh”. Though it is only through his own oversight that this catastrophe could have taken root, upon returning to the new world, Christopher Columbus falls to his knees, throws his fists into the air and cries, “Damn you, Amerigo!”

APRIL 14 1912, ATLANTIC OCEAN: The RMS Titanic, going at full speed to most appropriately display the grandeur and strength of the ship, collides with an iceberg. Though pre-warned, the ship’s captain, Edward John Smith, can hardly be blamed for the huge masses of malevolent drifting ice. After the initial impact, Captain Smith was reported to have calmed down the panicked masses by encouraging them to return to their rooms and take a nap as he carefully buttoned up his lifejacket and lowered his lifeboat into the freezing waters below.

APRIL 2 1957, KENYA: Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall at age 23 has the life-changing encounter of meeting anthropologist and paleontologist Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey. After thoroughly impressing Leakey with the extent of her knowledge and her highly functional motor skills, he enlists her as his personal assistant, believing to be on the verge of an extraordinary break-through of being the first man to utilize an assistant chimpanzee. However, when in 1960 she travels to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in western Tanzania, she finds her long-lost familial society, and spends the next 36 years of her life living in her natural habitat. Leakey tried once again to gain a long-term assistant by later recruiting a possibly much more promising prospect named Curious George.